Apple is allowing children under 13 to have their own iTunes accounts as part of a new push coming later this year to increase the use of its iPad in education.

Previously, iTunes accounts had officially been available only to users age 13 and older, something that could have hampered schools in their use of Apple technology for teaching young children. Read more →

How much do you love using Pinterest for educational clips and tips? Well, welcome to the educational version of clip and share technology! eduClipper is a free web tool focused on helping students and teachers find, build, and share valid learning experiences in a K-12 safe education social platform.

eduClipper is a platform designed specifically for teachers and students that allows your students to find, collect, build, and share web content quickly. While content is set to share publicly by default to encourage the sharing of these great gems, you can chose to set your content to private. Read more →

It is a wealth of online resources for teachers and online courses for students addressing the urgent social issues of academic disparity and the rising cost of post-secondary education.

This resource boasts more than 32,000 tutorials on a variety of academic topics taught by 6,000 thousand teachers using blends of video, text, audio, and slideshows. This online learning community helps teachers enrich their classrooms and empowers students to learn their own way, while providing a pathway to an affordable college degree.

Cloud based tools like Google Apps, Office 365, and iCloud have exploded in popularity and accessibility. Everyone is reaching to be your one-all-be-all online document storage and productivity suite. We live in a world where we can write and edit the very same essay paper on a smart phone, tablet, or any internet connected computer very easily. In addition we can share that paper with someone who can help us refine it, in fact we can edit the paper at the very same time. Collaboration has never been this accessible. In education we want to encourage real world applications of collaboration and teamwork. Many have worried collaboration can be used for cheating. How can Hapara help?

Subtext is a free iPad app that allows classroom groups to exchange ideas in the pages of digital texts. You can also layer in enrichment materials, assignments and quizzes—opening up almost limitless opportunities to engage students and foster analysis and writing skills.

As the Director of Technology I have the interesting challenge of identifying, evaluating, and recommending curricular tools that improve our district’s education quality. One helpful evolution that has happened recently is the adoption of Common Core Standards or College and Career Readiness Standards. Why has this helped, you might ask? I was not familiar with the former standards and now get to learn these new ones. I’m not at as much of a disadvantage with District peers because they are learning them too. One thing that I’ve heard over and over is the testing and assessment process will evolve into a much more sophisticated testing environment. A skill set will not just be tested by static multiple choice questions. They will be dynamic and adjust to the student depending on their proficiency of specific granular processes and skills. Can a student think deeper, not just eliminate the wrong answer and select the remaining one. I say this because our tools and teaching environments NEED TO CHANGE. We can not just make minor tweaks to an old system. It involves work. So I’m going to share two technology tools that I felt really change the way we evaluate a students progress through Reading and Math.

One of the most impressive demos we witnessed from an educator this week was about augmented reality. A definition will not explain the concept adequately. You must see it to understand it. Imagine that your students are sent home with a traditional worksheet. They initially have trouble understanding the concept or requirements of the work sheet. Then the student uses his or her iPad, opens a special app and points the camera at the worksheet. Suddenly the blank paper worksheet is transformed to a video of his teacher describing and annotating that exact work sheet. When looking through the iPads screen it really looks like the annotations are happening right on your personal worksheet.